Unofficial news and tips about Google

April 30, 2006

Amazon Drops Google From A9 And Alexa

A9 (Amazon's search engine) and Alexa (online traffic monitoring service) have replaced Google as default search engine with Windows Live Search. There's no official information about this change, but this is the first major success for the new Windows Live Search, the replacement for MSN Search. A9 search engine powers web search at Amazon.com and IMDB.com.

22 comments:

have you tried microsoft's new search lately? i've been using it for a couple of weeks and its taking over more and more of my searches. It seems about 90% as good as google at this point, compared to 30% as good (6 months ago), IMO.

actually Ionut Alex. Chitu, a lot of people use it. these are the poor folks that install stuff without understanding what it is. they end up with things like Alexa and don't have a clue what they are even looking at.

I've been using msn for search ever since I installed IE7. I have to say, I'm not missing Google one bit. The search is on par with Google results, and the advanced settings for search results and image search are really useful.

Good. We need healthy competition in search services. We've seen the bad effects of monopoly in OSes (though there are some benefits too); we don't need Google to have a monopoly in searches and other internet services.

The key here being "healthy" competition. It always seems that Microsoft competition is anything but healthy. Netscape had a larger market share, now no longer exists, not because it was a poorer browser, but because MS bundled IE.

The key here being "healthy" competition. It always seems that Microsoft competition is anything but healthy. Netscape had a larger market share, now no longer exists, not because it was a poorer browser, but because MS bundled IE.

This is how a monopoly is made -- you think you are stopping Microsoft, but you are actually making Google a monopoly.

Plus, Netscape lost market share not just because Microsoft used dirty tricks but that Netscape 4 sucks, period. People like to tease at IE now, but back at that time, it's light year ahead of Netscape. Yes, I would say that the difference b/w IE 5 and NS 4 is even bigger than the difference b/w IE 6 and Firefox now. Netscape has no one to blame besides itself and AOL.

well more the things change more they remain the same.. Every SW major hates Msoft but tries to be like them. Who does not want its OS running on almost all the PCs in this world, its office product being used so much that almost no competition exists.. if given a choice all these so called "healthy competition" proponents would become msoft.

M$ is retarding the development of the web by abusing its position as market leader in not complying with web standards. For this reason we should be saddened when M$'s position is strengthened, like when a trusted vendor like Amazon endorses their search engine.

do you realize how big a turnoff that is for the vast majority of us? Some of us would join your open source /google/etc movements, if not for the the overwhelming sentiment so accurately described above. The slashdot crowd is severely limiting the larger movement.

The M$ ethos is profit before all else and this is more abhorrent than any raw slogan. For 20 years I have watched M$ grow by taking someone else's innovation or design and beating them down with a M$ version of the same. Angry utterings like 'M$ must die' could be more eloquently phrased, but I for one understand the frustration that causes such perhaps inappropriate shouts. For the record, nobody is right, everyone is out to profit from what should be public property. It's the dot com era that needs to die!

A9 is a tiny Palo Alto division of Amazon.com It's going no where, this is not a blow for Google, just shows how incompetent the A9 staff are. I've been to the building by the way, it really is "tiny." I tried to sign up for AdCenter recently to test it out, unfortunately it only supports IE 6+, and I only have access to my Mac and a Debian box. Way to compete with Google, cut out all your non-Windows users, which probably make up most tech savvy webmasters. Loads of people in third world countries can't afford Windows and use Linux or other UNIX-based operating systems. I will definitely put an article up about this on my blog as soon as I have time to research it further.

a9 was really quite nice when powered by Google. Especially when you could get both search and images side by side, on the same page. Its recent changes are unfortunate, and in my opinion render it useless. I've written to a9 twice to complain, but didn't recieve any comment.